MEMBER MONDAY

Many of us grew quite fond of a certain fresh-faced McGill University student named Eli who interned with Sina a few summers ago. Actually, Eli’s toughest assignment involved some books Sina made him read. Young Eli then graduated with a finance degree and wondered about the next chapter…

There may be no better way to close out the subject of Truth in the postmodern world than with a reckoning of social media’s role in shaping perception…

Imagine, as some would have it, the prospect of the president under oath. There’s Mr. Trump, hand raised, as he solemnly swears “to tell the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth.” Eyes roll as he spins yet another narrative. Perjury trial ensues. The defense opens with the president's own statement:  “Listen, judge and jury, what are you gonna believe — my truth or your own lying eyes?”…

It’s now been sixty years since this one-time eight-year-old kid first faced what might be called the metaphysics of an afterlife. Before the Sunday school class that day the whole concept of heaven and hell had been introduced as cartoonish metaphor — imagine that all people were born with arms so long that their hands couldn’t reach their mouths: hell, you see, would consist of all those wretched, starving souls unable to feed themselves; heaven, on the other hand, would be populated by the joyous, well-fed ones who’d learned to feed each other. Fair enough…

Ten years later and some fans in Philadelphia still talk about it. On October 29, 2008 Brad Lidge pitched the final out of the decisive game-five to win the World Series for the Phillies. This capped his perfect record in the regular season as closing pitcher. Brad had touched the very stars that year.

Brad will join us for Member Monday (2/5) as we try to imagine what it must be like to be famous, even momentarily, even among a contingent. In his novel Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow described the onset of fame: “I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnake handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation.”

Like it or not, the only constant is constant change. That even (especially) applies to Boulder. The only question is whether you embrace it. You ignore it at your peril. 

Come along for the ride as we share and discuss the Boulder vision. The ink is not even dry on probably the most exciting major city project since, well, since the Pearl Street Mall decades ago. You've undoubtedly heard broad references to the Civic Area redevelopment, bordered West/East by 9th and 17th and North/South by Canyon and Arapahoe. Well, the gem of that project is now taking shape in what's called the Boulder Center and Nature Art Science Port, also known as the West Bookend Concept Plan. Yes, that's West as in its proximity to our own Highland City Club…

“In a perfectly efficient society man is redundant”

 Len Barron, quoted at an audience talk-back at the World Affairs Conference some decades ago

The man behind that quote will join us for Member Monday (1/15). Many of you know Len Barron as Boulder’s own educator, playwright, director, writer, and dancer, whom most recognize for that one-man Einstein performance -- the one celebrating that physicist's deep sense of humanity marked by fairness, beauty, and playfulness. Those are words not commonly associated with efficiency.

So let us then reflect back on that quote as we discuss man’s standing in a world increasingly seduced by efficiencies, the efficiencies of technology that is. We are accorded a front row seat to such spectacle by way of  “Inside China’s Vast New Experiment In Social Engineering” (link: https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/). The venue may be overseas but the phenomenon most assuredly is not. It’s America’s embrace as well.

In a quote attributed to Bismarck, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." Well, fair enough, but how about watching the making of one who makes the laws?

We are honored this next Member Monday (1/8) to welcome Mark Williams, candidate for the second Congressional District district seat (includes Boulder County), the one vacated by Jared Polis who, in turn, is running for the governorship. The winner of the democratic primary to be held this June will most assuredly win the seat in November….

One remembers that some primitive peoples feared being photographed because they thought the camera would make off with their souls. That notion may have prefigured dating in today’s social media world: soulless images uploaded to interact with other soulless images as the real souls are left out to dry, becoming mere residue in this virtual carnival world of the contemporary mating dance.

The idea of a character becomes imprisoned in an image, whether in the form of a picture or of a calculated narrative. The root power at play is one of projection. The mind needs its illusions. Applied to the dating world, a projected image hangs out there awaiting judgment, often rendered by way of an instantaneous left/right swipe reflex. Nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s your facade. You know, it’s just a numbers game….

For those of you who anticipated the topic for Member Monday (12/11) to be Social Media please note that this session has been rescheduled to take place the following Monday (12/18). In its place the topic for this Monday shall be The Middle East: 

In a perfect follow-on to last week's discussion of "The Fate of Empires" we'll contemplate the dynamics at work for new alignments and new empires. This coming Member Monday will, in a sense, be a continuation of last week as we address current affairs in the Middle East in the context of the formation and reformation of empires that have made up world history…

Invest even a modest amount of time and effort in this remarkable twenty-four page essay (Click here to read “The Fate of Empires and the Search For Survival,” by Sir John Glubb) and you will be rewarded with a renewed appreciation of history, presented not as discrete and disconnected segments but as the sweeping, interconnected story of the dynamics powering the rise and fall of empires over the last four thousand years. This wide-angle lens captures ten such representative empires -- Assyria, Persia, Greece, Roman (pre- and post-Augustus), Arab, Mameluke (Egypt, Syria), Ottoman, Spain, Romanov Russia, Britain -- each served up not so much for individual analysis but as exemplars of the organic flow characterizing human development…

“After God cast Lucifer and his followers into darkness, all the fallen angels came straggling on the plains of hell — to recriminate, to console themselves and to discuss their new identities as devils. . . . . It may be time for men to hold a convention for the same purpose”.

Thus begins a Lance Morrow essay http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,980115,00.html?artId=980115?contType=article?chn=us written twenty-three years ago (“Men Are They Really That Bad?”, Time, Feb. 14,1994)….

Gaslighting is the somewhat clunky gerund verb form of Gaslight -- a 1940s movie depicting a man set out to drive his wife into thinking she was going insane by means of manipulating her through the creation of a false reality. The term has slowly seeped from the psychological circles into the mainstream. It can describe any manipulation through willfully-induced disorientation. 
(It is a state depicted in the wonderful novel Catch-22  -- itself less of a coherent story than a kaleidoscope: a disorienting collection of character introductions, sleight-of-hand logic, tricks, and paradoxes all mixed together and flushed down the rabbit hole. The book was such an assault forty years ago on my own painfully linear background -- born and bred linear; at a linear time; in a linear place; with a linear education; and a (later) linear profession  -- that I recall throwing the book across the room: the reflex of a linear soul beholding a mobius world.) 
It may be applied at the wholesale level in the form of fake news. What is it that you can hold onto in the political world these days? Gaslighting would suggest an active perpetrator(s) with a private agenda and an unwary victim. Might the victim be an entire country? Of course it might. The means to do so looms large and promises to explode…

Boulder will be treated this Friday (10/27) @7:30 to a free concert at C.U.'s Grusin Music Hall which features C.U. Doctoral candidate Maria Kurchevskaya, together with Ekaterina Kotcherguina, soprano, and Maria Wietrzynska, piano, presenting "four cycles of songs for voice and piano . . . . (evoking) a variety of moods, from mysterious yearnings and sensitive feelings of love to childish innocence and sarcastic fun . . " But that's not all. The real treat is that Maria will be joining us the following Member Monday as we discuss the very subject of music's evocative power…